When working with file security, the traditional approach to securing any file or set of files is to encrypt the entirety of the file as a whole. Many API's exist to encrypt files and many applications include those API's to perform the encryption and decryption. One common aspect of such API's is the encryption of the entire file and the storage of that file. For API's, OpenSSL or Crypto++ are common examples of API's. Likewise, Norton and APG are common examples of applications. Unfortunately, if someone is able to overcome such encryption, they have access to the full file, such that these prior protective encryption methods warrant improvement.
Another common feature with applications that handle files, such as WINZIP, is the ability to break files into parts and put them back together. While useful for storing and transferring large files, such tools do little to protect against nefarious efforts to obtain such files. Similarly, many applications can write data in the cloud, to network drives, local drives and other removable mounted devices similar to SD cards, all of which carry risk of unauthorized access.
Data storage redundancy, also known as software RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks), is a well-known methodology for providing a failsafe in the event that hardware should fail. When a file is written with any RAID 1 and above, the data written is copied to different locations. Should any location fail, the file can still be recovered because parts of the file are repeated in different file locations. While such redundancy provides a helpful backup function, it again does nothing to protect against unauthorized file access.